Clueless at the ATM

There’s a new public menace afoot and I can’t stay silent any longer. It’s the ATM Squatter. They take a few different forms.

The other day I went to a drive-up ATM. There was one car ahead of me. Waited. Waited. Waited. Finally I peaked my head out to see what the hold up was. The guy at the front had a stack of ten or more ATM cards in his hand and was conducting separate transactions for each. I can only assume these were not simple cash withdrawals as he was probably averaging about fifteen button pushes per card. I kid you not. This struck me as in all probability, non-legitimate transactions but admittedly, I’m jumping to conclusions.

On to the ATM that’s inside the bank. There’s one person at the ATM. She’s pressing a lot of buttons. I waited for a while and finally got curious and took a peek to see if I could tell what she was trying to do. She was trying to withdraw $120. She kept getting a message saying “Your withdrawal exceeds your available funds.” She would then simply restart the whole procedure, again trying to withdraw $120. ATM’s are really uncooperative if you’re trying to withdraw more money than you have in your account. I must have watched her do this three or four times until I couldn’t take it anymore.

So I gave up and went to an ATM that was in front of the bank. Huge line. You could immediately sense the annoyance of the people in the line as the person in front was having a lot of trouble. This is the one person I’m going to cut some slack. She was pretty old. She looked old enough that the majority of her life was lived prior to the prevalence of ATMs. That makes ATM cluelessness acceptable. If you’ve done the majority of your banking through vacuum tubes, you get a break from me.

But to the rest of the world, think about what you want to do at the ATM before you get there. Much like the person who gets the front of a big line at Starbucks only to realize they have NO IDEA what they want (let me give you a clue: coffee), remember the whole idea of the ATM is to make things quicker than it would be with an actual bank teller.

Some of us are eager to return to the safe confines of our abode. Please be considerate.